Cryolithic writes: A young Australian undergrad has found some of the missing mass. From TFA:"A Monash student has made a breakthrough in the field of astrophysics, discovering what has until now been described as the Universe’s ‘missing mass’."Link to Original Source

I have a Geiger counter from the 1960's that includes a small sample of radioactive material on its side for testing and calibration. The manual states that there should be a certain number of clicks per second, and based on the half life of the material, it looks like it still works fine. Amazon also sells small samples of uranium that have a specific number of clicks per second that you can use to test your equipment.
Other than that, there is a normal level of background radiation that amounts to about 14 clicks per minute if no other material is available, but this might not be viable in your area.
Actually, I don't really have a pressing need for my Geiger counter, and it sure sounds like you need it more than me. If you want, I'd be happy to ship it. Let me know.

Maybe I'm just being altruistic, but I would find it easier to forgive a human than a computer. Humans show remorse, and it would be far easier for me to forgive a person than to say "oh, well, the computer clearly did the best job it could". I think that would be more of an issue to me.

I think that 60 days is a good time frame, because on top of fixing the vulnerability, you also have to convince users to install the patch. Deploying a patch to a large userbase is going to take time, and probably longer than it takes to fix the problem in the first place.
That being said, maybe a more responsible approach would be to tell the vendor (and the world) that you're going to publish the vulnerability in X days or 30 days after they release a patch, whichever is longer. Now the vendor has serious motivation to fix the problem and users aren't needlessly being put at risk.

tekgoblin writes: With the recent problems with reception on the iPhone 4 and all of the users affected it had sparked a flame under one senators butt. Senator Charles Schumer wrote a letter to Steve Jobs asking for a statement from Apple and a commitment to fix the current problems free of charge for users.

But since a quarter of large corporations - $50m in sales or $250m in assets - don't pay any income taxes at all due to loopholes and offshore sheltering schemes...

Kudos on citing your source, but you're completely misrepresenting what the article says. The article states that, overall, two thirds of corporations don't pay income taxes, meaning that large corporations are actually better at paying taxes than other corporations. Furthermore, the article states that the "vast majority of the large corporations that did not pay taxes had net losses... and thus no income on which to pay taxes". Claiming that large corporations don't pay taxes because of loopholes and sheltering schemes is patently false.

I think the difference there is you never paid to use Slashdot. If you disagree with their change in terms, you can return the item for a full refund. I doubt Sony's going to allow you to return your console for a full refund.